In his book of correspondence with the noted French writer Michel Houellebecq, Public Enemies, the French journalist, activist and philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy wrote on present Russia: “Not only does this Russia inspire no desire in me, it fills me with horror. I’d go so far as to say that it frightens me because I see in it a possible destiny for the late-capitalist societies. Once upon a time, during your postwar ‘glory days,’ the middle class was terrorized by being told that Brezhnev’s communism was not an archaism restricted to distant societies but rather a picture of our own future. We were wrong: it was not communism but postcommunism, Putinism, that may be the testing ground for our future.” (Continue...)

The Russian language may have failed as an imperial project of becoming a lingua franca in Eastern Europe, but many brilliant minds of the region are inextricably linked to the language. Today, Russian is increasingly seen as a tool of political domination over the former republics of the Soviet Union. (Continue...)

Over the past days and weeks, on a quick look at Russian TV channels (I have one even in my hotel at Strasbourg not to relax from the disturbing complexities of our life in the EU and in the vicinity – especially after comparison of Russian TV with BBC News or French TV) it was difficult to get rid of a déjà vu feeling. Every piece of information about Ukraine there is strikingly and frighteningly similar to what I had long been listening immediately after 13 January 1991 when the Soviet troops killed fourteen peaceful civilians in Vilnius. (Continue...)

Jokes are not terribly kind to the Russian language and its political reputation. One of them, for instance, deals with anticipations of the emergence of a new global lingua franca as the outcome of the rise of the economic and political power of a respective nation.(Read more...)

This is exactly what comes to my mind trying to assess EU policies vis-à-vis Ukraine and Viktor Yanukovych. What happened in Ukraine? That’s obvious: Ukraine and the EuroMaidan are hardly anything less than a Deus ex machina manifestation of pro-European passion and faith. This is more than a timely emergence of such a sentiment, as the EU expects and fears – and rightly so – the European Parliament to be elected in May 2014 that is highly likely to be richly represented by far Right and Euroskeptics. (Continue...)

I believe that there is no reason to insist on the crucial importance of journalism for politics. We can hardly expect a miracle of sound and reasonable politics to happen where the decline of analytic and investigative journalism takes place. The political class has ceased being the outcome of education and upbringing nowadays; instead, the logic of mass democracy and mass education imposes on us the unquestionable primacy of the swiftly shaped public opinion which no public figure can escape. (Read more...)

What happened to Ukraine? Nothing that might have come as a shock. Russia applied a classical strategy, yet we would hardly know whether the sticks dominated over the carrots, or the other way around. To put it simply, this would be the question as to whether the Kremlin promised to ruin Ukraine’s economy – provided the Verkhovna Rada should have decided to pass all the necessary pieces of legislation needed to send a message to the EU and to Germany in particular that Ukraine qualified for the club the Vilnius Summit would be much of a formality, or whether it pledged its old allegiances to Viktor Yanukovych reassuring him that he remains the only choice of Russia’s political elite or, to be more precise, of its power structure - the siloviki or law enforcers. (Continue...)